Moving Along

I don't get things done quickly, but I do get them done.

I've got two pots set up in the new container garden north of the house...pole beans and lettuce.  These pots are a hundred liter capacity, I'm way too fed up with all the various nuances of the obsolete British system of gallons and cubic feet to deal with it anymore.  It's called the American system here, but it's a relic of the days when we were a British colony.  The British have abandoned it mostly, some diehards still cling to the old ways of doing things as you might expect. 

From now on when I shop for things like pots I'll look for the liter capacity and ignore the rest.  There are four different gallons in use, but only one liter.  Most writers seem to regard these big pots as #25 pots, but actually I think they were originally designated as #20 size, since they really only hold about 20 gallons of soil...which would have to be measured in dry gallons, not liquid gallons as everyone seems to be doing lately.  But as I said this is only historical info for me, I'm done with gallons and cubic feet...also with rods, furlongs, cubits, hands, or whatever archaic systems people still use in places that are disconnected from the rest of the world.

I should point out also that the reason I don't get a lot of work done in the garden relates to my disability, which I would rather not bring into things in this blog.  Gardening is my escape from all that.

So anyway, my first batch of nursery containers...100 liter size...should show up any day now.  What's holding me back right now is the compost, it's going a bit more slowly than I expected.  But I should have enough to set out a nice row of pots in the new section soon.  I have two piles going and they're both getting warm.  The newest one is steaming in fact...go microbes!  It takes me about five or six weeks for a batch to run...if I shred it first.

I've also set up a bunch of 34 cm pots recently.  Those hold about 23 liters of potting soil.  I keep recycling those by dumping them in a wheelbarrow, mixing with compost, and shoveling the soil into a fallowing barrel where the soil stays for about a month before I reuse it to set up pots.  This gives time for the soil microbes to work for a while and time for pathogens to be devoured by the high level of microbial activity.

The turnips will be ready to pull soon.  They're starting to make nice fat roots and all my worries will soon be over with that crop...assuming they're edible...LOL.  I never seem to get around to photographing them...too bad I can't just give them a camera and ask them to do selfies.

I'm also harvesting my eggplant...they're absolutely delicious.  I thought I'd developed a sensitivity to eggplant and I would have to give up eating them.  But it turned out to be a bad batch of seed that produced plants with inedible fruit...awful stuff that burned my throat and gave me indigestion.  They tasted OK, but they were definitely toxic...they probably had back-crossed with some wild eggplant in Thailand where the seed originated.  Eggplant do grow in the wild there, I've found out.

So watch out for bad batches of seed...it can happen.  I currently advise buying seed from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds at rareseeds.com or from Southern Exposure at southernexposure.com. But I'm sure there are many other good sources.  I don't want to name my source for that bad seed...I noticed that variety...Masego...has been discontinued in their catalogues.  So they must be aware of the problem. Nobody's perfect...everything else I bought from them has been excellent quality.